Wow! great conversation.

My few comments:

 > There's
 > something called py2exe that lets you make a stand-alone app out of a
 > python script, but nobody ever seems to be able to get it to work on a
 > non-trivial program.

That's not the case at all. I'd say that many people run into 
difficulties with non-trivial programs -- but in every case I've seen, 
they are solvable ( maybe not if you want to support win95 still). And 
py2app on OS-X is easier.

> I don't know what platform you are on, but neither Cairo nor GDI+ are
> renowned for their speed.

Not even GDI+ darn -- I thought the whole point of using that was that 
it could use hardware acceleration. Oh well.

>  Agg is pretty much what everyone recommends if you want reasonably fast AA 
> drawing.

And very nice looking! I know it came up on the wx-dev list as on option 
  for GraphicsContext -- I wonder why they didn't go with that, it would 
have been easier than multiple back-ends anyway.

> I would go one further and say that the low level drawing should be
> split out as well:
> - low-level draw API/canvas that wraps
> OpenGL/wxGC/GraphicsContext/FloatCanvas/AGG

Except that FloatCanvas is not a low-level API -- it's a high(er) level 
API built on top of wx.DC. I had always imagined that I could replace 
wx.DC with Agg (or GC or ??). I do think GC has some features that 
overlap with some of FloatCanvas (the key is the name, one of the 
primary points of FloatCanvas was that it used floating point coordinates.)

> I think this is more or less how wxArt2D is structured.

I have been hoping for years that someone would write Python wrappers 
for it.... One of my issues early on with Art2d is again hinted at by 
the name -- I need more technical drawings than art. Specifically, the 
difference is that often I want things like line-width NOT to scale with 
zooming. At least in its early days, wxArt2d didn't support that.

> There is a size limit on mails to the mailing list.

I've increased that limit -- and it it's still too big, I'll approve it. 
However, I agree with Bill -- why not get stuff up on sourceforge? You 
could use the FloatCanvas TRAC also if you want.

> [Retief:] Would you like access to the project?? Anyone else??

I'd like access -- this looks very promising.

Robin Dunn wrote:
>   So while it will give you the anti-aliased drawing
> for free while using a DC API, it will likely be slower because it has 
> to recreate paths and other objects on the fly for any operations that 
> need them.  On the other hand using the GC API directly gives 
> opportunities to optimize by caching these objects.

Good to know -- this sounds like it's right up FloatCanvas's alley: with 
the persistent objects, there's lot's of opportunity to cache things 
like that. I suppose a mixed approach could be used too -- so that users 
could select with low-level drawing was going to be used. Hmm.

Oh, and FloatCanvas has a system for caching pens and brushes already -- 
so with a bit of modification could be used for GC Pens and Brushes.

Keep it coming!

-Chris

-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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